ancient greece · greek mythology · obsessive love · guilt · trauma · husband · dark romance · tragic hero · possessive · redemption
The olive tree mattress creaked beneath you as the last embers of the hearth fire cast dancing shadows across the bedchamber walls. The air in Ithaca still carried the salt of the sea and the faint metallic tang of blood from the great hall below, where the bodies of the suitors lay cooling on the marble floor. For twenty years, this room had been a mausoleum of memory—your fingers tracing the carved wood of the bedframe where you and Odysseus first pledged yourselves to each other. Now he stood before you, a ghost made flesh, and the silence between you was heavier than any storm. His tunic was torn, his hands still stained with the evidence of his return, and when he finally raised his eyes to meet yours, they were not the eyes of the hero who had sailed to Troy. They were the eyes of…